Traditional Mongolian Script

The Mongolian script is an alphabet written in vertical columns, top to bottom, with the columns following each other from left to right. Mongols call it Mongol bichig, 'Mongolian writing', or Hudum, 'the old one', to tell it from the later Todo script. It is the script of the Mongol Empire: tradition says the Uyghur scribe Tata-tonga brought it to Chinggis Khaan's court in 1204, and the oldest surviving Mongolian text in it, the Stele of Yisüngge, was cut about 1224. The letters came from the Old Uyghur alphabet, which came from Sogdian and ultimately from Aramaic, so the Mongolian script is a distant cousin of the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic alphabets. Somewhere on that road the line was turned a quarter turn to the left, which is why Mongolian runs down the page.

Letters in a word join along a single vertical stem, and most letters have three forms: at the beginning of a word, in the middle, and at the end, where tails and flourishes appear. Unicode stores one character per letter, ᠮ m, ᠣ o, ᠩ ng, ᠭ γ, ᠯ l, and the font chooses the right form from the letter's position, so ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ, Mongγol, renders as one flowing word. A reader does not sound out separate shapes; the eye runs down the stem the way it runs along a line of Arabic.

The script is built around vowel harmony. A Mongolian word takes either the back vowels a, o, u or the front vowels e, ö, ü, and i goes with both. The script leans on that rule: ᠣ o and ᠤ u are written identically, so are ᠥ ö and ᠦ ü, and in the middle of a word ᠠ a and ᠡ e are the same tooth-shaped stroke. The consonants ᠬ and ᠭ also change sound with the word's vowels, q and γ in a back-vowel word, k and g in a front-vowel word. Readers resolve all this from the word as a whole, which is why the script is learned as whole words and syllables rather than letter by letter.

The spelling is medieval and speech has moved on, so written and spoken Mongolian differ the way written and spoken English do. Čaγan ᠴᠠᠭᠠᠨ is pronounced tsagaan, 'white'; naγadum ᠨᠠᠭᠠᠳᠤᠮ is Naadam, the summer games. That distance is also a strength: the written standard sits above the dialects, so a text in Mongol bichig reads the same to a Khalkha in Ulaanbaatar and a Chahar in Inner Mongolia. The Mongolian Alphabet collection on this site is the Cyrillic alphabet used in Mongolia since the 1940s, and the Mongolian Script Letters collection is the short learner's set; this page is the full reference for the script and everything encoded with it.

The traditional Mongolian alphabet in order: vowels, consonants and galig letters

The seven vowels come first, ᠠ a, ᠡ e, ᠢ i, ᠣ o, ᠤ u, ᠥ ö, ᠦ ü, with ᠧ ē, a later letter for the e of foreign words, after them. Then the consonants: ᠨ n, ᠩ ng, ᠪ b, ᠫ p, ᠬ q, ᠭ γ, ᠮ m, ᠯ l, ᠰ s, ᠱ š, ᠲ t, ᠳ d, ᠴ č, ᠵ ǰ, ᠶ y, ᠷ r, ᠸ w. Mongolian children learn them as a chant of syllables, na ne ni no nu nö nü, ba be bi bo bu bö bü, each consonant combined with the seven vowels in turn, and dictionaries, name lists and school registers sort in this order.

After ᠸ come the galig letters, made over the centuries to spell sounds Mongolian lacks: ᠹ f, ᠺ k, ᠻ kh, ᠼ ts, ᠽ z, ᠾ h, ᠿ zr, ᡀ lh, ᡁ zhi, ᡂ chi. They carry the Tibetan and Sanskrit words of Buddhism, Chinese names (ᡁ and ᡂ write the Chinese syllables zhi and chi) and, since the 20th century, words from Russian and English. ᡸ, cha with two dots, is a rare variant used in some transcriptions and was added separately in Unicode 11.0 (2018).

A few letters hide a pitfall for anyone copying single characters. ᠭ γ and ᠬ q are each written with a plain stem and dots or a bow; before a front vowel the same characters read g and k, so there is no separate 'g' to copy. ᠲ t and ᠳ d look alike in the middle of a word; the script traditionally distinguished them only at the start and end, and modern print keeps that habit. And ᠶ y and ᠵ ǰ share a shape at the beginning of a word, so Yisüngge and ǰisü begin the same way on the page.

Todo, Sibe and Manchu: the scripts that grew from Mongol bichig

Three later scripts are built on the Mongolian letters, and Unicode keeps their extra letters in the same block, so they sit on this page in groups of their own. The oldest is Manchu. In 1599 the Jurchen leader Nurhaci had two scholars, Erdeni and Gagai, write his language with Mongolian letters; in 1632 Dahai added dots and circles to the ambiguous letters so that o and u, k and g, t and d could be told apart, which is why Manchu is called tongki fuka sindaha hergen, 'the script with dots and circles'. Manchu was the language of state of the Qing dynasty that ruled China from 1644 to 1912; the name plaques over the gates of the Forbidden City in Beijing are still written in Chinese and Manchu side by side. The five Manchu letters ᡳ ᡴ ᡵ ᡶ ᡷ and most of the 22 Sibe letters ᡝ ᡞ ᡟ ᡠ ᡡ … are the dotted and circled forms a Manchu text needs. The Sibe (Xibe) people of Qapqal county in Xinjiang are the last community that writes Manchu every day, in a slightly reformed form of its own, with a local newspaper and school lessons; the handful of Sibe-only letters and the Sibe syllable boundary marker ᠇ serve that form.

Todo, 'clear', is the script Zaya Pandita made in 1648 for the Oirat Mongols of the west. He kept the Mongolian stem but gave every sound its own shape and added a long vowel sign ᡃ, so a Todo text reads without the guesswork of o versus u. The Kalmyks of the Volga used it until 1924, and the Oirats of Xinjiang kept it through the 20th century; in Mongolia it is a scholarly script, read for the Buddhist and historical texts written in it. Its 26 letters, from the vowels ᡄ ᡅ ᡆ ᡇ ᡈ ᡉ to the consonants ᡊ ᡋ ᡌ ᡍ ᡎ ᡏ ᡐ ᡑ ᡒ ᡓ ᡔ ᡕ ᡖ ᡗ ᡘ ᡙ ᡚ ᡛ ᡜ, have their group above, and the Todo soft hyphen ᠆ is its own word-breaking mark.

Ali Gali (Mongolian galig, from Sanskrit āli kāli, 'vowel row, consonant row') is the set of extra letters the translator Ayuush Güüsh devised in 1587 so that Sanskrit and Tibetan could be transcribed sound for sound into Mongolian books. The group above holds the signs anusvara ᢀ, visarga ᢁ, damaru ᢂ, ubadama ᢃ ᢄ and baluda ᢅ ᢆ, the letters for the retroflex and aspirated consonants Mongolian never had, ᢌ ᢍ ᢎ ᢏ ᢓ ᢔ, and their Todo (ᢘ ᢙ) and Manchu (ᢚ to ᢥ, ᢨ, ᢪ) counterparts, which did the same job for Oirat and Manchu Buddhist texts. You will meet them in mantras, sutra titles and the names of deities; an everyday Mongolian text never uses them.

The Mongols have written in other scripts too, and those have collections of their own: the square Phags-pa script of the Yuan court and the Soyombo and Zanabazar Square scripts of the 17th century are in the Soyombo, Phags-pa, Zanabazar & Marchen Scripts collection, and the Buryats, who wrote Mongol bichig into the 1930s, now use the Cyrillic Buryat Alphabet.

Mongolian numbers, punctuation and the birga

The Mongolian numerals ᠐ ᠑ ᠒ ᠓ ᠔ ᠕ ᠖ ᠗ ᠘ ᠙ are decimal digits like 0 to 9, written in the same column as the text, so the year 2026 is ᠒᠐᠒᠖. Their shapes are those of the Tibetan digits, borrowed with the Buddhist books, and they appear on the dates of old manuscripts, in page numbers of printed sutras and, today, on monuments and in calligraphy. Everyday arithmetic in both Inner Mongolia and Mongolia uses the ordinary digits.

A traditional text opens with the birga ᠀, a flourish that marks the head of a text, chapter or verse, something like a pilcrow and a title ornament in one. Scribes drew many kinds, and the Mongolian Supplement block, added in Unicode 9.0 (2016), encodes thirteen of them: the birga with ornament 𑙠, the rotated 𑙡 and inverted 𑙧 birgas, the double 𑙢 and triple 𑙣 birgas with ornament, and the swirl birgas 𑙩 𑙪 𑙫. They are taken from manuscripts and woodblock prints and are the characters to use when you set a classical text or want an authentic ornament at the top of a column.

Inside the text the comma ᠂ and full stop ᠃ do their usual work, ᠄ is the colon and ᠁ the ellipsis, and the four dots ᠅ close a chapter, a poem or the whole book. Question and exclamation marks are borrowed from Western punctuation and set upright in the column. The nirugu ᠊ is a piece of bare stem: it stretches a word for spacing or joins the halves of a compound without breaking it. Manchu has its own comma ᠈ and full stop ᠉, a single and a double dot beside the stem, which Manchu and Sibe texts use instead of ᠂ and ᠃.

How to type Mongolian script, fonts, and vertical text on the web

Tap any character above to copy it. For real typing, Windows has a Traditional Mongolian keyboard (add the language Mongolian (Traditional Mongolian) under Time & language) and has shipped the font Mongolian Baiti since Windows Vista. macOS, iOS and Android rely on Noto Sans Mongolian, Google's free font that covers the whole block; if you see boxes or unjoined letters, installing it is the fix. In Microsoft Word type the hexadecimal code and press Alt+X: 1820 Alt+X gives ᠠ, 182E gives ᠮ, 1800 gives ᠀. In HTML write ᠠ for ᠠ. Phones in Inner Mongolia use dedicated Mongolian input apps, and in Mongolia people usually type Cyrillic and convert when they want the traditional script.

The Mongolian block (U+1800 to U+18AF) has been in Unicode since version 3.0 in 1999, but it is one of the hardest scripts in the standard to render, because the encoding is phonemic: the font must know Mongolian spelling to pick the right shape, and for years different fonts picked differently, so the same text could look right in one app and wrong in another. Unicode 14.0 (2021) reworked the shaping rules and added a fourth free variation selector ᠏ (U+180F) to the three from 1999. The selectors FVS1 to FVS4 are invisible characters placed after a letter to request a particular variant shape; the Mongolian vowel separator (U+180E, invisible and not shown above) detaches the final a or e in words like ᠪᠠᠶᠢᠨ᠎ᠠ baina, 'is'. Leave them out of ordinary copied text unless you know the word needs them: a stray selector is the usual reason a pasted word shows a dotted box or a wrong tail.

On the web Mongolian and its daughter scripts are the living scripts whose native direction is vertical with columns running left to right, and CSS has a value for exactly that: writing-mode: vertical-lr on the paragraph or page sets the text in its proper columns, top to bottom, new columns to the right, with the letters upright and joined. Leave text-orientation at its default; browsers know Mongolian stands upright. Without that rule the text is laid out horizontally, left to right, with each word rotated to lie on its side, which is how most chats, search boxes and social media show it. The words are still correct and copy and paste normally; only the display is sideways. Mongolian calligraphy, written with a brush or reed pen in that same vertical flow, has been on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding since 2013, and calligraphers in Ulaanbaatar and Hohhot teach it to new pupils every year.